Vietta Grinberg: I am Vietta Grinberg. I run global sales product within digital markets at J.P. Morgan, and I'm joined today by Olivier Cajfinger. Olivier runs IG credit sales, public finance, and short-term credit sales. Welcome. Can I call you Caj?

Olivier Cajfinger: Yeah, everyone calls me Caj, so please.

Vietta Grinberg: Excellent, very good.

Olivier Cajfinger: Very happy to be here today.

Vietta Grinberg: So before we get into the intricacy and complexities of running a global sales business at J.P. Morgan, perhaps let's talk a little bit about your career. How'd you get started, and how did you end up and where you are today?

Olivier Cajfinger: Of course. So I joined J.P. Morgan 20 years ago in our Paris office, where I stayed for a couple of years. Then I moved to London, where I stayed for 16 years, and then on the back of the Brexit strategy, I got relocated to Paris. I've done my entire career at J.P. Morgan in the financial industry, and, as you said, I'm running now global sales force, which is focusing on, as you said, on IG credit, public finance, and short-term credit. We have teams all over the world, as you can imagine. Paris, Frankfurt, London, New York, Boston, San Fran, and I could keep on talking, listing the cities. And yeah, it's a challenging job, but also very exciting.

Vietta Grinberg: So Caj, tell me about the transformation of this industry, especially in your business, especially reflecting on credit. How are things different today versus when you got started or even 10 years ago? And specifically around what do you look for when you hire? What do you look for when you bring on talent? Have things changed drastically, or are they consistent? If we can maybe talk a little bit about that.

Olivier Cajfinger: Sure. So I think my business, the IG credit business, has gone through multiple changes from a product perspective, from a trend perspective, from a tool perspective, from a technology perspective. And our clients have become much more sophisticated, much more mature about the credit agenda and about also the various technology that have been launched in the last few years.

We all hear about ETF, we all hear about alternative credit, we all hear about index products. Our clients have become much more sophisticated in the way they invest in the credit market. And as a consequence, our job has been to remain on top of those new trends and being capable of serving them in the right way, taking into account those new technologies.

The challenge of the job is to have a global approach to that. Trends in Europe are different than trends in the US or in Asia. By having a global approach as well, it helps to potentially copy-paste some of the good practices in the US into Europe, or vice versa. That's for the fundamentals of my business.

When it comes to hiring, I guess at the end of the day it's a people business, so we are looking for people that care about our clients. We're going to be looking to serve the client in the best way as possible, but are also thinking a step ahead, are aware of the new technologies, are aware of the new trends, are thinking about innovation, and more importantly, being very entrepreneurial because our job is to understand what are the client cares, what are they looking to do, and being agile and entrepreneurial to save them the right way. So having salespeople who care about their clients remain the most important thing.

Vietta Grinberg: So pivoting a little bit towards the digital agenda, and you and I spent a lot of time connecting on the workflow automation solutions, brainstorming how can we make the life of a salesperson more efficient? How can we arm the salesperson with the best data? How has that changed, and what are your reflections on the journey at J.P. Morgan with digital markets so far?

Olivier Cajfinger: Yeah, I indeed remember very well our first interactions when you were working me through the automation agenda and where you wanted to go, and needless to say, and I'm sure you remember, I was a bit skeptical-

Vietta Grinberg: Yes, there was some skepticism.

Olivier Cajfinger: ... because obviously changing habits is tough. And I do remember your answer was "Caj, I've seen that movie multiple times, so you need to trust me." Having said that, you were right, and it took us a bit of time to understand where the different markets were going, where you wanted us to focus on, and I guess the different teams all over the world have been now focusing and adopting the automation process that you work through. And definitely it has been naturally held by our client requirements, because obviously our clients are also thinking the same way that we are: the low-touch agenda, the high-touch agenda, how do you execute in a faster way, how do you execute in a more impactful way and efficient way. So the automation agenda has been clearly helpful to, again, deliver the right service to our clients.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So Caj, in credit sales, coming in the morning within the credit markets, what does that look like for a salesperson?

Olivier Cajfinger: So first of all, a coffee-

Vietta Grinberg: Coffee, yes.

Olivier Cajfinger: ... to start with. The joke aside, then obviously you look at what have been the main headlines overnight, what has been the past activity the last few days. You obviously reach out to your clients first thing in the morning, sharing color, flows that we have seen and we have executed because they are keen on hearing what J.P. Morgan has been either trading or doing.

Then the dialogue starts. We look at, as I said, the past activity, the cares that our client showed in the last few weeks, and, as you know, we've built a tool internally to keep track of this, what we call IOI, indication of interest, which helps salespeople to remember, to follow up, and to potentially come back to the client with the right offering that they're looking for. So the day-to-day is really interactions between our traders, our research, our syndicate, which brings a lot of new issues, as we know, and obviously delivering this platform to our clients and making sure we match what they are looking for and what we can potentially deliver in light of their requirements.

Vietta Grinberg: I recall when we started working together, a lot of the asks, a lot of the requests from the sales force were around "Help me bring the franchise together." Right? We cover our clients in so many different geographies and we need to see where their common interests around a particular credit. So I remember at the time, really our investment in bringing the franchise together, bringing the data tools together, presenting them to the salesperson in an intuitive, fast, real-time manner, made a lot of the difference.

I remember through that journey us having to be thoughtful about protecting client's information, but at the same time building products that are going to be used by the sales force and ultimately help them deliver the franchise and deliver the value.

Today, building on top of that foundation, we are also looking at workflow automation in the transactional space. How do we expedite the process? Get the solutions to our clients faster from a booking perspective, from a straight-to-processing perspective? And that's another area where we are really collaborating a lot.

Olivier Cajfinger: I think the creative markets are multiple times bigger than they were a decade ago. What it means is means more issuers, more bonds, larger capital structure, just more activity, and many more clients all over the globe. So naturally we need to have tools that help us to log those data to remember them. I mean, when I started, I was using an Excel spreadsheet. Now we have all these tools that you and I have been building to make the job faster, quicker, and more importantly, more impactful for the clients. Because with a different tool that we build, each salesperson has access to the past inquiries or trade of the client they cover, the potential good trade ideas that could derive from those past inquiries, the research input, the research analysis. And all that together, by being displayed and offered by the tools we have built, helped the different salespeople to reach out to the client in a faster way and more importantly, in a more impactful way by basically pitching the trade that will be the most interesting for them by using all this data and tools.

Vietta Grinberg: When I reflect on the challenges that we have to solve for enabling our sales force, when I look at a globally distributed team that is talking to clients in Tokyo, in Hong Kong, in Paris, in London, in New York, in San Francisco, in the Middle East, all over the world, I think our goal, our job within digital markets, is in a distributed environment, in a distributed team, make it feel like the salespeople are sitting right next to each other. Make it feel like we're all right in the same room and we can just talk to each other, even though, of course, physically that's not possible because the business is that complex and that distributed. So what we try to replicate with the tools that we build, with the technology that we are collaborating on, is really creating this network effect, where we build a technology in such a way that even though you could be in a completely different time zone, it feels like you're collaborating with your colleagues right there and then. And not too dissimilar from some of the day-to-day applications that we use in our personal life. Wouldn't you agree?

Olivier Cajfinger: Yeah, absolutely. The complexity of our credit markets, the fact that it's a much richer offering compared to a decade ago, plus the fact that our franchise is now much more global than it is, mean that if we want to make sure we are leveraging on the size of the network of customers we cover, mean that we absolutely need to leverage on the tools we have built to make sure that, as you pointed out, we can leverage on the network effect that you mentioned. I think our credit offering is much more diverse than it was a few years ago; it's richer, but our network of investor is also much larger than it was a decade ago because everyone is invested in credit now. So the importance of connecting the dots internally has never been that important, and the only way to be capable of connecting the dots in an efficient way is to leverage on the tool that your team and my team have been building these last few years.

Vietta Grinberg: No, for sure.

Olivier Cajfinger: Keep in mind that our salespeople have four screens in front of them, and two of them are dedicated to the use of data. How they are reading those data, how they are delivering those data in a user-friendly way to our clients, but also helping them to connect internally with Trader Syndicate, but also other salespeople in various regions, and that helps us to connect the dots even further.

Vietta Grinberg: All right, some fun stuff.

Olivier Cajfinger: Good.

Vietta Grinberg: What does your coffee order look like?

Olivier Cajfinger: It's a very boring order.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay.

Olivier Cajfinger: It's a double espresso during the winter, and it's an iced coffee during the summer.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay, so it's seasonal.

Olivier Cajfinger: Correct.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay, very cool. If you could pick somebody at J.P. Morgan to have lunch with, who would it be?

Olivier Cajfinger: Of course it'll be with you, Vietta.

Vietta Grinberg: Naturally, but we do it enough. So if you had your pick somebody to have lunch with, who would it be?

Olivier Cajfinger: I think I would love to have a lunch with the film crew today because I felt like a Hollywood actor, and that was the first time in my entire life that I felt that way.

Vietta Grinberg: I agree. This is the most glamorous experience at J.P. Morgan for me, for sure.

Olivier Cajfinger: And for me as well.

Vietta Grinberg: One of the things that motivates me in the morning before I come into work is that I feel that in our industry, in our roles, every day is a new problem to solve, which is awesome. I can't say that what I'm working on today is going to be the exact same thing as what I'm going to work on tomorrow. Having the privilege to work at J.P. Morgan, you really get to solve some of the more complex and interesting problems, and I love that. I think that's absolutely awesome. That's a great part of our jobs. What motivates you?

Olivier Cajfinger: It's very comparable. I think a lot of people think that our job can be boring because it's very repetitive and the same task every single day. Actually, I think it's the total opposite. Every single day is different. It's very entrepreneurial. It changes a lot; we have new dynamics every single day. I'm sure you've seen the movie Groundhog Day. Every single day is different. So that's what motivates me when I come to the office every morning.

Vietta Grinberg: No, agreed. We talk a lot about how we use technology in our day-to-day lives all the time, and of course that has an influence on how we build products within J.P. Morgan or for our salespeople, for our traders, for our clients, and even how we use technology in our own personal life. The importance of staying connected in a global business is critical. The importance of me staying connected with my family is very important. I'm actually in transition right now. I'm transitioning from using texting as one of the main ways of staying on top of where my kids are, where my family is, to now going to Snapchat because the kids have made that transition, so now naturally I have to follow. So it's just interesting how it all gets intertwined, and a lot of the experiences that we have from our personal lives for how we use tech are also influencing how we build products with our clients, in collaboration with our clients, with our salespeople, and with our traders. What about you? What's your go-to app every morning?

Olivier Cajfinger: I use LinkedIn all day long.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay.

Olivier Cajfinger: LinkedIn is a fantastic source of information for my day-to-day job. It gives a very good sense of the trends in the markets, the pulse of the new technology, the different new products that are coming to the market a bit everywhere. So LinkedIn is really my good, my go-to app every single morning.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, no, makes a lot of sense.